issue resolved. it was native syslogd process that was "holding" /dev/klog. now when i killed native syslogd - syslog-ng starts OK. i will now edit /etc/rc and /etc/rc.conf to prevent the native syslogd daemon from starting.

that to indicate that no syslogd instances are running, syslog-ng is running and listening on port 1468 (as stated in configuration file). that seems pretty cool, but the thing is when i try to restart syslog-ng (due to configuration file changes, for example), i get the following: